The plays of Clifford Odets (1906-63) have fallen out of the mainstream
in recent decades, perhaps because people are afraid they are dated and
unplayable. Since Odets’ plays are rooted in the New York Jewish experience
during the Great Depression, the question is whether they still have
anything to say to contemporary audiences.

The production of Odets’ Awake and Sing! now at
Washington’s Arena Stage, directed by Arena’s founding artistic director
Zelda Fichandler, proves that concern to be unwarranted. It’s solidly
directed and acted with sensitivity, generosity, and genuine warmth.

The 1935 play was Odets’ first major success, focusing on three
generations of a Jewish family in the Bronx trying to live and even succeed
in harsh conditions. This production's set by Andromache Chalfant makes the point before
any actors even appear: the apron in front of the stage displays broken
chairs, discarded portraits, and other scraps of furniture, suggesting
families who have been evicted because they couldn’t afford to pay their
rent.

While the time is the middle of the Depression, the family of indomitable
Bessie Berger (Jana Robbins) and her meek husband Myron (Steve Routman) is
at least hanging on. The family also includes Bessie’s father, Jacob (Robert
Prosky), an eastern European immigrant who believes in Socialism rather than
God, and the Bergers’ two adult children, Ralph (Adam Green) and Hennie
(Miriam Silverman).

The drama is naturalistic, based in the interactions between the
characters. Hennie is already 26 and, as her mother says, not getting any
younger; she has two suitors, Moe Axelrod (Adam Dannheisser), a sharpie who
lost a leg in the Great War, and hard-working recent immigrant Sam
Feinschreiber (Richard J. Canzano). Ralph, meanwhile, is in love with a girl
his mother scorns because she’s not Jewish.

The class issue is another major concern. Myron, who idolizes Teddy
Roosevelt and his can-do philosophy of success, has spent his life as a
haberdashery clerk, and Ralph has an aimless job in the garment trade. In
contrast, Bessie’s brother Morty (Brian Reddy) worked his way up to own a
garment factory, so he can afford to be generous to his relatives when he
feels like it.

Odets wrote with a sort of vernacular lyricism, heightening the words
without making them too distant from everyday speech. Jacob’s criticism of
capitalism boils down to “Life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills,” and
Ralph compares the beauty of his girlfriend to stars and “French words.”

Prosky gives another rock-solid performance, giving an indication of how
Jacob has lived his life, and what causes his ultimate defeat. He is well
matched with Robbins as a tough-minded woman but a fair one, determined to
hold everyone else’s life together regardless of what they might want. The
others all have their moments, from Silverman’s defiant, wounded pride and
Canzano’s constant sense of being an outsider in his own life, to
Dannheisser’s hard shell.